The Blue Site

Left Wing Panic Over PBS

Cal Thomas was on O'Reilly tonight and he mentioned a writer for CURRENT (the inside PBS magazine for PBS execs, stations, etc), a man named Louis Barbash who wrote an article on Bill Moyers and his former PBS series, NOW. Barbash mentions that NOW is different than many other PBS political shows in that it's a show directly from PBS (like The Newshour with Jim Lehrer and Washington Week). Barbash says:

Strongly held and strongly expressed opinions on PBS are nothing new. Neither are programs that revolve around the convictions of a high-profile host. Conservative William F. Buckley's Firing Line enjoyed a run on PBS almost as long as Moyers'. The McLaughlin Group is syndicated mostly to pubTV stations.

But Moyers' Now has been different. For one thing, programs like Firing Line, McLaughlin, To the Contrary and Ben Wattenberg's Think Tank are independently produced and offered to stations. Now is part of PBS's public affairs portfolio, like the NewsHour and Washington Week, receiving slots in the schedule, network promotion and the bulk of its funding from PBS. Moreover, the show was pulled together and its host recruited by PBS President Pat Mitchell.

More importantly, Moyers and Now have departed from PBS's traditional, almost obsessive, pursuit of balance and objectivity. The NewsHour, for example, tries to represent both — sometimes all — sides of every issue. It airs foreign policy experts who think Iraq has been a catastrophe as well as those who think it'll turn out for the best, economists who think tax cuts put us on a path to prosperity and those who think they're milestones on the road to ruin. Mark Shields v. David Brooks. Michael Beschloss v. Richard Norton Smith

Very good points...The PBS President, Pat Mitchell (who took a lot of fire recently for the Postcards from Buster episode for kids that was centered around a lesbian couple- Mitchell will resign her post last this year) put the show together and got Moyers on as host. Moyers has always been a big time left-winger, and one could very easily argue that he's on the political fringe, and Mitchell had to know all of this, which says a lot about her ideoloy as well, I think. NOW is given much better timeslot, as Barbash also points out- NOW usually airs on Friday nights in Primetime, while the other show that PBS created to try to balace out the programming, The Editorial Report (from The Wall St. Journal's editorial board) often times airs in the middle of the night over the weekend. That's often times the case for the two shows, tho of course all PBS stations have different lineups and air the two shows at different times. Tho, there's no doubt that Moyers himself and the show he once hosted both get much more attention and are advertised more often than Editorial Report.

Barbash continues on about NOW:

Now created its own model — not so much a forum for contending views as a platform for Moyers' critique of policy and politics, incisively argued and buttressed with documentary sequences and interviews with mostly concurring voices.

Of Now's 19 segments on the war, for example, only four included anyone voicing support for it. In one of the four, a nine-minute segment on the burden the war has imposed on military families, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) got just 41 seconds to say that hard-pressed families receive help from neighbors and families as well as from the government.

After reading these two paragraphs, it should be once again noted that Ken Tomlinson, the new Chairman over at CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), the funding arm of PBS, never asked for NOW to be cancelled, and he never wanted it to be censored in any way...he thought the show should simply go on as it always has in the same form, but that PBS should find another show to balance it out, and continue to do this with ALL of the PBS programming. Fairness and balance, that's all he ever asked for.

When a writer for the PBS insider magazine itself sees an ovbious bias and deparation from the norm with a show like NOW, you know there's a problem.

The panic on the left is mind boggling. They're running scared of changes that merely demand balance and fairness. The proposed cuts to PBS might be well warranted in an age of hundreds of cable channels, satellite TV, more broadcast networks with a wider range of programs, and more. Maybe the cuts go too far, that point is debatable; frankly I'm not very familiar with the budgeting process and exactly how funds are allocated to PBS and the PBS stations across the country. The obvious point is- PBS has dealt with problems of inbalance, and NOW is the poster child for this problem. The situation has been rectified to some degree with the balance offered by new programs such as Editoral Report and Tucker Carlson's show (tho, I believe it's now a defunct PBS offering), but balance in the future and fairness overall has to be put into play. Without it, PBS isn't fair to anyone. Being partly funded by the American people, the public deserves no less.